ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the psychiatric-historical background of the anti-psychiatric movement in Britain. It begins with a brief account of the rapid development of institutional psychiatry in the inter-war period which produced the first therapeutic communities at Northfields and Mill Hill during the Second World War. The chapter then considers what was described at the time as the 'third revolution in psychiatry'. It takes two key documents as starting points for this discussion—the World Health Organisation's report on The Community Mental Hospital and Thomas Percy Rees' presidential address to the Royal Medico-Psychological Association Back to Moral Treatment and Community Care. These documents provides the connection between the discourses of the therapeutic community and what would later become known as 'deinstitutionalisation', as well as the attack on traditional psychiatric practices, all of which would later become foundational ideas in British anti-psychiatry.
